


Self-Determination

by sulwashoo



Category: Voltron - Fandom
Genre: Gen, Illness, Implied Character Death, Medical Establishment, Medical Inaccuracies, terminal illness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-26
Updated: 2018-07-26
Packaged: 2019-06-16 10:52:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,810
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15435510
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sulwashoo/pseuds/sulwashoo
Summary: Aiko was playing with Takashi when the call from the doctor’s office came in. She had completely forgotten about the appointment, which was supposed to solve the mystery of her arms and legs, which sometimes went weak and numb for no reason. The doctor had performed a battery of tests - physical, psychological, genetic - and now was urgently requesting she come into the office to review the results.





	Self-Determination

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first work in about 10 years so I’m pretty nervous. Also, I’m not Japanese and I don’t have an autoimmune disorder/terminal illness/disability, so if there’s something that’s glaringly incorrect please let me know!

Shirogane Aiko sat numbly in the passenger’s seat, watching the countryside roll past. The doctor kept his hands on the steering wheel and his eyes on the road, barely moving except to swallow dryly and pat his forehead with his handkerchief. After learning that Aiko had ridden her bicycle more than 30 km to reach his office, he had awkwardly insisted on taking his lunch early and driving her back to her home, where she lived with her parents and young son. Aiko had politely protested that she biked into town frequently and had never experienced any problems before. But he would not take no for an answer, or even let her put her own bike in the back of the car.

Bitterly, Aiko realized that this was what her life would look like from now on. Her body would become a cage, and other people would stare at her through the bars, pitying her. She clenched her teeth.

-  
Aiko had awoken a few days before the appointment in an ecstatic daze, smiling at her ceiling. At the age of twenty, she had been accepted into a fairly prestigious university to study astrobiology, her academic passion. She specifically wanted to study the tiny bacteria that were living just under the crust of ice on Europa. She hadn’t known if she would get in or not - she was older than most applicants, and her academic record had rough patches. But she had been accepted. As she lay in bed, her happiness faded into apprehension for her young son, who she would miss terribly, and her parents, who were getting on in years and were no match for Takashi’s buoyant energy. She oscillated between joy and anxiety for the entire morning as she made breakfast for her family. Her parents knew about the acceptance and were supportive, as they always were. But Aiko knew it would place a heavy burden on her family if she left. Her parents weren’t struggling, but they weren’t well-off either, and Aiko’s income was important. Moreover, she worried for Takashi. Would he resent her for leaving? Would their bond be broken? She could come home on the weekends, but that would be an additional expense.

She was playing with Takashi when the call from the doctor’s office came in. She had completely forgotten about the appointment, which was supposed to solve the mystery of her arms and legs, which sometimes went weak and numb for no reason. The doctor had performed a battery of tests - physical, psychological, genetic - and now was urgently requesting she come into the office to review the results. Aiko’s happiness tipped back into anxiety, and stayed there.  
-

At the office, the doctor had been distant and unemotional as he informed her of the hereditary autoimmune disorder which was slowly consuming her muscles and would eventually kill her. He did not look her in the eye as he explained that her muscles would eventually atrophy to the point where she was not strong enough to breathe. There was no cure, and the treatment was limited, based mainly on minimizing her inevitably terrible pain. He gave her three years, five on the outside, a fair portion of which would be spent in misery. He said this all without emotion.

But as soon as she picked up her bicycle, he suddenly become a gentleman incapable of letting such a frail young lady ride a bike home. Aiko was repelled by him and made a mental note to find a different doctor as soon as possible, but distantly noted the futility of it. For the rest of her life now, she would be seen as a weak being.

They rounded a corner and Aiko abruptly returned to the present, as if her soul were a fish being reeled back in toward her body. She recognized the landscape, they were very near her neighbor’s house. At the office she had intended to have the doctor drop her off at home, then walk over to her neighbor’s. Suddenly she changed her mind.

“Could you stop there? I need to get something,” she said to the doctor, gesturing at her neighbor’s house ahead. He made a slight face, as if he were the put-upon one and not she. He slowed to a stop in front of the house, and Aiko stepped out and walked to the front door.

Takashi must have seen her through the window because he leapt into her arms as soon as she opened the door. Honda Kumiko, her elderly neighbor, often watched Takashi while Aiko and her parents could not. She greeted Aiko kindly, and asked after her appointment, which Aiko had been vague about. 

“It went well, thank you,” said Aiko, bowing slightly while Takashi clung to her like an octopus. Kumiko leaned over, looking past Aiko at the unfamiliar car behind her. 

“Who is that?” She asked. Aiko mumbled something about an acquaintance from the city, knowing that soon the entire town would know that a strange man had driven her home. She politely extracted herself from Honda Kumiko’s grasp with the promise to drop by and chat later, but could not avoid accepting the bag of cucumbers which Kumiko insisted she take. In total, the doctor waited seven minutes or so in the idling car. 

-  
The symptoms of Aiko’s illness had actually first appeared during her late teens, as was typical for its progression. However, her spells of physical weakness and loss of muscular control were attributed to other causes, namely her pregnancy with Takashi and the death of Takashi’s father, Aiko’s boyfriend. They were seventeen and had been officially dating for two years, but had known each other since they were infants. Aiko was two days older than Tadashi and never let him forget it. They were a good match, and Aiko was happy, but Tadashi evidently wasn’t. He committed suicide the weekend before school was supposed to start in the early spring. No one had seen it coming. He had been a healthy, popular boy, with a bright future, and his death cast a pall over the town for several weeks. No one could understand, especially Aiko. He had never expressed any particular unhappiness to her, and she thought he told her everything. Aiko was inconsolable - she was frequently ill, and very depressed. She didn’t attend school for weeks. Terrified that their daughter would follow her boyfriend, her parents sent her to a psychiatrist, who referred her to a GP for a physical before prescribing anti-depressants. That was how she learned she was pregnant.  
-

Aiko carried her son back to the doctor’s car, sitting with him in the front seat. Takashi looked at her in surprise. She always sat in the back seat of cars with him - mainly by default, as they usually traveled with both her mother and father. Aiko buckled the seat around Takashi’s back, and he leaned his head against her chest and looked at the doctor, who continued to stare straight ahead but had paled considerably. 

“This is my son, Takashi. He’s turning four this autumn,” Aiko told the doctor coolly, as he fumbled with the gearshift. She felt a perverse satisfaction at his discomfort. Look at my son, she thought. This is the boy you say will be an orphan in five years. She knew it was irrational, but Aiko blamed the doctor more than her own body for the illness. She didn’t feel all that sick. She didn’t feel like her son would watch her waste away and die before he left primary school. She stared at the doctor, stroking Takashi’s soft hair. When they arrived in front of her house, Takashi tumbled off her lap and out of the car. Aiko and the doctor also exited. She watched him struggle to remove her bike from the trunk, pleased that the wheels had left streaks of dirt on the light gray interior.

-  
Aiko surprised her parents by deciding to keep the baby, though she had never expressed much maternal interest before. Everyone acted like she was making a grand sacrifice, that her decision was the natural completion of Tadashi’s tragedy. But in truth Aiko’s decision was purely selfish. Tadashi had left her, and she had been given the opportunity to keep him in some way.

She named her baby Takashi, spelled to mean courage and integrity, the things they would both need in the years ahead. When his eyes focused for the first time, he stared at her, blinking curiously. They looked at each other for a long time, memorizing each other’s faces.  
-

Aiko watched the car roll back down the road, then turned to Takashi, who was waiting for her. “Mommy, is everything okay?” He asked. He was an empathetic and intuitive child. Suddenly light-headed and overcome with love, Aiko walked toward him, stumbling to kneel before him and tug him into her arms, kissing his face. She forced her mouth to smile and told him that everything would be fine.

That night, Aiko sat in Takashi’s bedroom, on the floor next to his little bed. She hadn’t been able to tell her parents about the diagnosis. She would do it tomorrow. Right now she just wanted to look at her baby. She watched his tiny chest rise and fall as he slept. Her illness was hereditary and Takashi likely had it. She would need to take him in for rounds of tests and a diagnosis, but in her heart Aiko already knew the answer. As she stared at him, her blind terror and helplessness slowly crystallized into determination. 

She slipped out of the room to retrieve her laptop, then resumed her post on the floor next to Takashi’s bed. She opened the laptop and examined the acceptance letter from the university. Just yesterday, astrobiology had been her passion. Now it seemed laughable to study microbes from a distant moon when she was dying, when Takashi was dying. She could change her course of study when she arrived at the university. It would require more paperwork, as would her illness, but Aiko was filled with frenetic energy now. She had a lot to do and not much time to do it. She had been peripherally interested in human medicine for awhile now, and kept up with recent breakthroughs. There was a headline recently about treating a different dystrophic illness with mild electric currents. That might be a good path to start down. She had some time left, enough to get started researching treatment: something to divert the course of the disease, or lessen its impact, or lengthen the time frame. The doctor had given her five years, but Aiko swore to herself that she would live longer. She had to. She had to find something to help her son, allow him to live a full, extraordinary life. Aiko watched Takashi, and smiled to herself.


End file.
